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August Featured SlideDeck: DODOcase

We love seeing what people create with the tools we make, so moving forward we’ll be regularly featuring the finest SlideDecks from all around the web. This month, we sat down with designer Ryan Foster at RyanFosterDesign and Craig Dalton from DODOcase – creators of exquisite, hand-made cases for your precious iDevices – to chat about the custom SlideDeck they created for their stunning website.

Tell us a little bit about DodoCase

Craig:DODOcase is a designer and manufacturer of cases for Apple’s iPad and Amazon’s Kindle. The DODOcase iPad Case is handmade in a traditional San Francisco bookbindery. Matching a classic black Moroccan fabric to an innovative bamboo iPad tray, the DODOcase has won praise the world over for its stylish looks and performance. Featured in the pages of Vogue, GQ and Wired magazines, the DODOcase has become the must have iPad case for both the tech and Hollywood set. Named MacWorld’s iPad Case of the Year in 2010, DODOcase has a growing and passionate community on Facebook and Twitter.

What was your overall vision for your website, and how did SlideDeck fit into that?

Craig: At the time in which we implemented SlideDeck, DODOcase was introducing its third major product line and was having a hard time displaying all we had to offer in a small amount of space. SlideDeck enabled us to talk about all our products in the space it used to take to talk about a single product. Our customers can now load a homepage that shows all our major product categories.

Ryan: One of the main objectives of the latest DODOcase redesign was to showcase the expanded product range. We wanted to provide quick links to the different DODOcases products that were available for various different devices (iPad, iPad2 etc), but we also wanted to minimise the amount of real estate we used (the brand story and endorsements were also important homepage content)

SlideDeck was perfect for this. Using the horizontal and vertical scrolling features, SlideDeck allowed us to create a slider component with multiple layers of content enabling users to quickly access core products’ information easily and quickly.

How did you evaluate SlideDeck against other sliders?

Craig: We were impressed by the flexibility of the SlideDeck vis-a-vis other sliders and attracted to its ability to expand. Given only a small amount of site real estate, I feel like we are able to convey a ton of information.

Ryan: We looked at other sliders and found a few that could do what we wanted. But SlideDeck’s flexibility and nicely structured code meant it was going to be really easy to work with. Also, unlike a lot of jQuery components out there, SlideDeck is well documented with some really useful tutorials, which is always nice 🙂

Tell us about the customizations you made

Ryan: Visually, [we did] quite a lot! We wrote a lot of custom CSS to integrate the SlideDeck with the DODOcase look and feel. We also added the device shortcuts across the bottom of the slider.

How long did it take to implement?

Ryan: The basic structure was up and running in hours, but the CSS customisation took more time, and then we had to integrate with Shopify (all the content is managed via the Shopify admin). Probably 3.5 days in total.

Breaking it down: Why we love it

There was some lively debate among our team as to what we liked about this particular SlideDeck – here are the things that we all managed to agree on:

“The simplicity and the integration of it into their site. It doesn’t look like a generic ‘SlideDeck’ and one wouldn’t be able to look at their site and be like ‘ah ha! That is a SlideDeck’.” ~ Matt, Designer

“They didn’t just use a horizontal SlideDeck, but nested a bunch of horizontal ones (one for each product) in a primary, single slide vertical deck…They’re getting clever with deck nesting and using simple API calls (goToSlide) to display a lot of information in a very small space.” ~ Dave, Developer

“I love their Nested SlideDeck integration, and like Matt said, their custom design/integration that just fits very well with their site. You almost don’t know it is a SlideDeck.” ~ John, Developer

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Jason

Yep, we were really impressed with the care and thought that went into it. If you’d like to know more about it, you could always ping DODOcase’s designer, Ryan Foster, via his website (linked in the intro).